I’m still going to do Behind Us Forever for this week’s episodes, but the last two days have not been kind in terms of free time. In the interim, how about a little ratings schadenfreude?

Sunday’s episodes both scored dismal ratings, with the first one (“The Saga of Carl”) coming in at just 4.01 million viewers, and “Dangers on a Train” bumping up a bit to 4.52 million. The former is good for #2 on the all time least watched list, with even the higher rated second episode coming in at #10. Here is the current bottom twenty in terms of viewers:

#

S-Ep

Airdate

Viewers
(millions)

Episode Title

1

23-21

13-May-12

4.00

Ned ‘N Edna’s Blend

2

24-21

19-May-13

4.01

The Saga of Carl

3

24-20

12-May-13

4.05

Fabulous Faker Boy

4

24-17

14-Apr-13

4.07

What Animated Women Want

5

24-12

10-Feb-13

4.19

Love Is a Many-Splintered Thing

6

23-13

12-Feb-12

4.33

The Daughter Also Rises

7

24-8

16-Dec-12

4.41

To Cur With Love

8

24-19

6-May-13

4.43

Whiskey Business

9

24-18

28-Apr-13

4.48

Pulpit Friction

10

24-22

19-May-13

4.52

Dangers on a Train

11

24-13

17-Feb-13

4.57

Hardly Kirk-Ing

12

24-14

3-Mar-13

4.66

Gorgeous Grampa

13

23-20

6-May-12

4.75

The Spy Who Learned Me

14

23-22

20-May-12

4.79

Lisa Goes Gaga

15

24-15

10-Mar-13

4.85

Black-Eyed Please

16

23-18

15-Apr-12

4.86

Beware My Cheating Bart

17

24-16

17-Mar-13

4.89

Dark Knight Court

18

23-16

11-Mar-12

4.96

How I Wet Your Mother

19

22-18

10-Apr-11

5.00

The Great Simpsina

20

23-19

29-Apr-12

5.00

A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again

Of those twenty, nineteen are from Seasons 23 or 24, with the lone exception being from Season 22. Every single episode broadcast since February of this year has made the list. And not a single episode in all of Season 24 was viewed by more than 10 million people, the first time that’s ever happened. (The only one even close came after an NFL playoff game.)

In terms of average viewership, Season 24 ran away with the title of least viewed ever. After bumping along in the low seven million range from Season 20 through 22, last season fell down to just 6.13 million viewers on average. Season 24 sunk even further, averaging just 5.47 million viewers over its twenty-two episodes.

Now, the usual caveat about these ratings: these are just the overnight numbers. When there are significant changes to them (usually because a sporting event runs long), I make those updates, but these are not the fancy pants final numbers that take into account demographics, DVR viewers, and whatever else advertisers complain about. Nielsen only makes very limited data available to the public (at least, as far as I can tell), so these are the numbers I use, but don’t try reading anything into these in terms of “Will the show get cancelled?”.

The thousand monkeys at a thousand Blackberries who run FOX will be looking at those more detailed ratings as well as factoring in all kinds of things like whether or not a replacement would provide the same lead-in numbers for the rest of the Sunday lineup, how expensive said replacement would be, and how much Jean and company react when feces are thrown at them during meetings. (MacFarlane doesn’t even flinch.) Given the production lead time, we should be hearing something about a renewal beyond the current contract (on which there are 29 episodes left) sometime in calendar 2013, but that’s about all that can be said right now.

[Update 6:45pm EDT: Just saw this: CBS Takes Key Ratings Crown for First Time in 21 Years. FOX lost the battle for the nuts and gum people to CBS this year and their overall viewers were third at 7.0 million. No idea what the monkeys will think of losing to the old people network and having Zombie Simpsons dragging down their overall number, but it seemed worth mentioning.]

Give Zombie Simpsons credit, when they embarrass themselves for a pop star, they really embarrass themselves for a pop star. From start to finish, “Lisa Goes Gaga” relentlessly displayed the pitiful imagination and mediocre craftsmanship behind Zombie Simpsons. In an episode where they outright tell the audience, right up front in an opening narration, that they’re discarding the usual rules and that weird and strange things are going to happen, just about the only weird and strange things that they managed to conjure were a lot of Lady Gaga outfits.

Unfortunately for them, dresses made of birds and fire spitting bras will not fill an entire twenty minutes of screen time. They had to fill in the moments when they weren’t expecting us to laugh because Lady Gaga did something weird with empty and pointless scenes like the school awards, Flanders showing up to converse with Gaga and then disappearing, Marge’s weird behavior at the kitchen table (where she apparently lost the ability to let someone touch her and then quickly regained it), the flash mob, and Homer tossing Lisa around like an hourglass for no reason other than it took up a lot of time.

On top of all that, what little plot and story that did manage to exist between the Gaga fluffing and the filler didn’t make any sense and crashed into itself several times. Take, for example, the reaction of the townspeople to Gaga. When she arrives, they’re head over heels in love with her. Then, for no reason we see, they cheer that she’s sad as she’s leaving. Oh, and there were songs, but the less said about those the better.

Somewhere in all that mess, Lisa moped around for a while before she felt better, but we didn’t really know why she felt better until she explicitly exposited it – twice. The first one:

Lisa: Dad, thank you. Like always, the fact that I could tune you out without fearing that I’d miss out on something gave me the time to take stock and realize how ungrateful I have been. Which means, I’ve got a train to catch.

Sure enough, Lisa then catches a train, at which point we get explicit exposition #2:

Lisa: Gaga! Gaga: Lisa? Why are you here? Lisa: To thank you. Gaga: For what? Lisa: Look at me! You did help me, by allowing me to inappropriately focus eight years of rage and rejection on you. It was like a great sneeze. And now I can say what’s good about me.

Fortunately for Lady Gaga, Zombie Simpsons isn’t relevant enough to damage her pop culture standing, but that was weird, dumb, unfunny, and boring, even by their standards.

Anyway, the numbers are in, and Gaga did them no good. Just 4.79 million people tuned in for that hacktacular exercise in misbegotten pop culture references and inane self help statements. That’s good for #4 on the all time least watched list, and leaves Season 23 with an average viewership of just 6.13 million people, by far the lowest ever. Here’s the last five years of Zombie Simpsons:

Season 19 – 8.26 Million Season 20 – 7.12 Million Season 21 – 7.13 Million Season 22 – 7.10 Million Season 23 – 6.13 Million

At the time, Season 19 was easily the lowest rated ever, and then Seasons 20-22 were even worse. But Season 23 is a down a whopping 14% just from Season 22. This does set the bar low for Season 24 to avoid being the third consecutive least watched season ever, but tripping over low bars has become something of a specialty for Zombie Simpsons.

Tell Aaronson and Zykowski:

“Like one out of every nine Americans, I’m left handed. And, let me tell you, it ain’t all peaches and cream. Your writing gets smeared, Lord help you if you want to drive a standard transmission.” – Ned Flanders

I have two good things to say about “Ned ‘N Edna’s Blend”. First, we dodged the “storytelling episode” bullet. When they were backstage at the beginning talking about why they didn’t do Lenny’s story, I thought for sure we were in for four short, equally dull segments, but it turned out that they went with the less annoying single, long dull story. Second, this exchange from the Left Gifted Bi-Dexterous and Transhanded community scene was one of the best things they’ve done all season:

Flanders: We’re trying to decide on the theme for our Left Is Right parade. Left Handed Woman: Our Scissors, Ourselves! Left Handed Man: How ’bout Death to Righties. Left Handed Woman: We have to live among them. Left Handed Man: To live among them is to die! Are you even left handed?

They over explained it and kept the scene going a bit too long, but that argument is a genuinely excellent parody. Plus, “Fete Accompli” and “A Day to Pay Full Price” were well above average sign humor. I don’t say this often, but, well done, Zombie Simpsons.

Unfortunately, those brief moments were surrounded on all sides by the usual array of aggravating and careless problems. Need a character in a scene? Have them walk right up and announce their presence (there’s Homer and Bart through the window, there’s Helen, Luann and Bernice in the wedding shop, there’s Bart and the window again). Want to cram in a personal conversation or three? Have characters argue and reconcile in public with a total disregard for where they’re supposed to be (Ned and Edna at the party, Homer and Marge in their kitchen, Ned and Edna again in front of the school). Feel like explaining your jokes even as you make them? Have each punchline carefully pre-chewed for ease of audience digestion (Flanders with the chip clips, the recitation of what goes on at the liberal college, pretty much everything Homer says about playing Jesus). And, let’s not forget that the main story involved a lot of weird, out of character behavior and bizarre plot twists.

Zombie Simpsons has a habit of ignoring the history and characteristics of people, but asking us to believe that Ned Flanders (widower) and Edna Krabappel (divorcee) are unaware that marriages aren’t perfect was bad even for them. Flanders and Krabappel having problems with their relationship? Fine. Flanders and Krabappel not seeing eye to eye on Rod and Todd? No problem. Flanders being unaware that couples argue? Wha? And how on Earth did Krabappel pull the kids out of a school without Flanders knowing about it? All to often these characters and their actions are barely recognizable as human.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they are the worst ever. Last night’s meandering pastiche of marital woe and wonder was ceremoniously endured by just four million people. (TV by the Numbers has it exactly at a flat 4.00 million.) That is far and away the lowest number of all time, displacing “The Daughter Also Rises” from earlier this season in the coveted #1 spot. Eight of the ten least watched episodes are now from Season 23 (numbers are millions of viewers):

Presumably Lady Gaga will give them a boost next week, but it would take a viewership of 26 million just to haul Season 23’s average viewership (currently 6.20 million) up to the level of Season 22, and that ain’t gonna happen.

Near the end of “The Spy Who Learned Me”, Homer and Marge are running away from a nameless (and apparently Bolivian) guy who has just pulled a gun on Homer. This is the dialogue . . .

Marge: Why is he trying to kill you? And why did she call you her love? Homer: It was all a training exercise to make me smooth for you. Of course, she fell for me, and of course I wanted no part of her. Now the only one who can help us is Stradivarius Cain. Marge: The guy from the movie? Homer: I’ll explain later! Strad, come back! I know you’re in there!

. . . and then Homer bashes himself in the head a few times with a rock. I like this scene, not because it’s funny or entertaining, but because it crams virtually every problem from the rest of the episode into a single moment.

To begin with, it’s mostly unnecessary exposition. Take “Now the only one who can help us is Stradivarius Cain”. There is absolutely no reason for Homer to say that. The audience already knows who he wants to see, and while it’s true that Marge doesn’t, she’s about to vanish from the scene without explanation, which is another problem this episode has in spades. From Nelson robbing kids right from Willie’s hand and Krusty just appearing in that movie to all those women Homer hits on, “The Spy Who Learned” me has a boatload of mysteriously appearing and disappearing people. And there’s the fact that the scene itself makes no sense: no one else at this fancy party noticed the violence or the gun, Homer and Marge make it to the woods in no time at all, and, despite the fact that the guy compliments Homer on his hiding skills, Homer wasn’t hiding at all. He was standing up and talking out loud, a very poor way not to be seen.* When all is said and done, this scene is so dense with problems established earlier in the episode that, in a weird, funhouse mirror kind of way, it’s almost like an actual plot climax.

There was a B-plot as well, something that started about childhood obesity but then ended with Nelson getting into ludicrous shape with help from a personal trainer. It had many of the same problems, starting with the fact that Krusty’s mansion is shockingly accessible to anyone who wants to wander into it.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they are just awful. Last night only 4.75 million viewers realized that their imaginary friends say more interesting things than that total waste of Bryan Cranston. That’s good for #2 on the all time least watched list, and means that (counting a tie between Season 22 and Season 23 at #5), all five of the five least watched episodes ever have come this season (numbers are millions of viewers):

The Season 23 average is now a mere 6.31 million viewers. That’s more than 10% down from Season 22’s 7.10 million, which was already the lowest rated season ever. As recently as five years ago this show was averaging more than nine million viewers per episode, now it’s barely two thirds of that.

The title of yesterday’s episode, “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again”, is a reference to a famous 1996 David Foster Wallace article for Harper’s, in which he embarked on a giant luxury liner to experience the narrow, selfish, and vapid thinking that underlies the modern cruise industry (as well as the bland and mostly uninteresting people who think of it as the height of fun). It’s an enjoyably cruel piece of writing (it was later used as the headline piece to a book length collection of essays he published), and you can read the whole thing in PDF format. The subtitle is “On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”, and the main point is that cruise vacations are mercilessly inhuman.

Wallace held the cruise industry in utter contempt, and not without cause. It’s environmentally disastrous, ethically compromised, and generally unpleasant on anything deeper than a surface level. The spectacular sinking of the Costa Concordia in January is only the most high profile of the industry’s problems. Two years ago, they kept sending tourists to their fenced in resorts in Haiti while people were dying in earthquake rubble. Crew members, who work long and extremely stressful hours, routinely disappear without a trace. And just a few weeks ago, two fishermen died on their disabled boat when a cruise ship failed to rescue them even though the crew had been alerted by passengers to their presence. In other words, this is an industry that places a higher priority on cheesy lounge acts and shuffleboard than it does on human life, and it is ripe for parody and satire.

David Foster Wallace knew that the only way you could say something honest or interesting about cruise ships was by reveling in the ugliness that props up that gleaming facade of stark white hulls and perpetually happy people. Zombie Simpsons borrowed his title, and then did the opposite, making their cruise out to be so awesome and perfect that they actually wrote a song about how awesome and perfect it is. I realize it’s not their job to do exposes on irresponsible corporate behavior, but by sticking with such a sunny perspective they limited themselves to only the safest and most tame kinds of comedy (when they were bothering to attempt humor at all).

Of course, the episode did eventually descend into post apocalyptic chaos (and I thought we were done with the “Outlands”), but only after acting as an unpaid and unquestioning endorsement for most of its run time (and concluding that the only way to have a bad time on a cruise is to take one with Bart Simpson). And, it goes almost without saying, no part of the episode made the least bit of sense, from the completely unnecessary (and exposition filled) scenes where the family paid for the vacation, to Bart’s panic after the song, to the immediate descent of the ship into Mad Max 4: The Wet Warrior, to a quick sketch or two in Antarctica. Along the way, characters wander in and out of scenes for no discernable reason, the plot swings wildly from one idea to another, and most of the stabs at being funny are paint-by-number bricks like this:

Lisa: It’s so diverse! I’ve died and gone to a PBS kids show. [Kids in wheelchairs roll up out of nowhere.]

And this:

Marge: You’ll never guess how many bath towels they gave us. Enough! Bart: And there’s a DVD library of movies that haven’t been released yet! Whoa. Whoa.

The episode wasn’t completely without its charms, “Magazine Hater” magazine is pretty clever, and the cult of the lifeguard isn’t a terrible idea. But, again and as usual, the stuff that has a little bit of thought to it is drowned in a sea of garbage that can’t rise to the level of being semi-clever or even coherent. When this is your ending . . .

. . . the ship has irreversibly foundered.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they continue to be historically bad. Only 5.00 million viewers sat through last night’s infomercial for Carnival and company before hitting up the buffet. That ties last year’s “The Great Simpsina” for the fourth lowest number ever. The post-New Year’s episodes of Season 22 generally hovered around six million viewers. Season 23 is down to five million, and routinely fails to get even that many.

In what I assume was an unintentional irony, early in “Beware My Cheating Bart”, the writers had Bart say, “Doesn’t anyone realize I’m only ten years old?”. The episode certainly didn’t, and it managed to be worse than most “Bart gets a girlfriend” stories to boot. Bart seems to vacillate between being an experienced teenage dater and a little kid, sometimes within the same scene. One moment he’s happily going down a slide, and then next he’s getting hot and heavy with Shauna (who is herself of indeterminate teenage years). It would be creepy if it weren’t so dull.

However, just one oft repeated story wasn’t enough for Zombie Simpsons this week, so they also had Marge and Homer go through a marital spat. That one got resolved in the most pointless way possible when Marge decorated herself and the bedroom in an island theme, but managed not to notice Bart and Jimbo out the clearly open window. Again, this would’ve been creepy if it hadn’t been so boring and nonsensical.

As for the unimaginative Lost parody “Stranded”, I was reminded of their equally insipid Inception parody from a few weeks ago. Lost has been off the air for two years now, and everyone knew it was going to end in 2010 beforehand, which means that if you still want to parody it, you’d better come up with more than the same tired jokes (nothing makes sense, there’s no resolution, it’s all just empty plot twists) people stopped making two years ago. The Futurama alien language plug (it reads “watch futurama thursdays at 10”) was the only thing that was even kind of clever.

The Bill Plympton couch gag was kind of interesting, though it could’ve been half as long and gotten through pretty much the same stuff. I suppose it’s true that this is better than the usual, but the novelty of having someone else do the opening is starting to wear off. And speaking of wearing off, Kavner is really having a hard time doing Marge now. She’s been kinda off for a couple of seasons, but the number of times I’ve thought to myself “wow, that really doesn’t sound like Marge” has been way up since the middle of this season. She just doesn’t have the same range she used to, which makes it really tough to put much feeling into anything.

Anyway, the numbers are in and they are absolutely atrocious. Just 4.86 million viewers briefly lost all interest in sex last night. That’s the second lowest of all time, displacing “How I Wet Your Mother” in that spot. Four of the five least watched episodes ever are now from Season 23, and the average viewership this year is below 6.5 million. Season 22’s was 7.10 million, and there are still at least three episodes to go. Presumably Lady Gaga will give them a boost at the end of the year (and I’m not looking forward to putting Reading Digest together that week), but even her fame isn’t going to be enough to rescue that average.

Tell Aaronson and Zykowski:

“I suggest you leave immediately.” – C.M. Burns “Or what? You’ll release the dogs, or the bees, or the dogs with bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you? Well, go ahead. Do your worst! . . . He locked the door!” – Homer Simpson

Zombie Simpsons frequently repeats things from The Simpsons, but every once and a while they come up with a perfect confluence of failure, where all of the show’s many flaws combine into a single, memorable scene. The most recent one I can think of came last year, when they tossed Milhouse off a cliff to have a giant magic eagle save him so they could have him repeat, word for word, his declaration from “Mom and Pop Art”. Yesterday, Zombie Simpsons put together another one, as it managed to bungle Burns releasing the hounds.

We’ve seen lots of people come to the doors of Burns Manor over the years, and just as many have turned right around and fled to avoid becoming dog food. Burns does not like other people, and he hates dealing with them so much that he trains his dogs to attack Girl Scouts. He’s released the hounds on do gooders, on small children, and even on his own employees after the company picnic. It’s a perfect character trait for him because it is every inch of his contempt and cruelty wrapped up into one casual gesture he orders without a second thought.

Near the monotonously boring end of “Them, Robot”, Homer runs to Burns Manor while being chased by killer robots. Burns opens the door without even looking, he then tries – and fails – to release the hounds before having them turn on him instead. Then, against everything Burns used to stand for, he helps Homer escape. Now, this isn’t the first time they’ve made Burns incompetent and kind. But it is the first time they’ve had him fail so utterly at what was once one of his signature moves.

On top of that, and this goes almost without saying, none of the story that led Homer, the killer robots, or the unemployed people who eventually save the day to his door made any sense. Burns hires all these robot workers, and then ignores them while Homer runs amok, and none of the workers would know to go help there. And let’s not even get started on the extended segments of town wide destruction and robot car crashes.

I did actually laugh out loud at the robot fart joke, which is the first time Zombie Simpsons has gotten that out of me in a long while. Of course, I’m a long time fan of robot fart jokes, dating back at least to that Futurama episode where Bender and the rest of the robots save the Earth by “venting”. Other than that, this episode can rot in a burning pile of corpses . . . oh, wait. They did that too, didn’t they?

Anyway, the numbers are in and they continue to be humiliatingly low. Last night’s remarkably dull apocalypse was mechanically endured by just 5.24 million viewers. That’s up slightly from last week, but still good for tenth on the all time least watched list. There have been eight new episodes of Zombie Simpsons since New Year’s, six of them are among the ten least watched ever. Yes, Zombie Simpsons has more lucrative demographics than most shows so lowly rated, and yes those are overnight numbers, not the ones that include a couple of days of DVR viewers. But there’s no escaping the fact that Season 23 is notably lower than any previous year.

I’ll do a more detailed analysis after the season finale, but for now just know that from Season 20 through Season 22, Zombie Simpsons was on a ratings plateau, averaging slightly above 7 million viewers per episode, and only declining a little from year to year. Season 23 is currently just above 6.5 million per episode; and unless it scores some unusually big numbers in the next few episodes, it’s going to end up well below that for the season.

Useful Legal Tidbit

Even though it’s obvious to anyone with a functional frontal lobe and a shred of morality, we feel the need to include this disclaimer. This website (which openly advocates for the cancellation of a beloved television series) is in no way, shape or form affiliated with the FOX Network, the News Corporation, subsidiaries thereof, or any of Rupert Murdoch’s wives or children. “The Simpsons” is (unfortunately) the intellectual property of FOX. We and our crack team of one (1) lawyer believe that everything on this site falls under the definition of Fair Use and is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. No revenue is generated from this endeavor; we’re here because we love “The Simpsons”. And besides, you can’t like, own a potato, man, it’s one of Mother Earth’s creatures.